Primary Pathos Plethora

C'mon, democracy, democratic republic? You might have been correct 230 years ago to draw a contrast between the two (Madison makes the distinction in Federalist #10), but nowdays the term democracy has been broadened to include more than just direct democracy, but also democratic republic (see Wikipedia, et al). The contemporary use is that democracy is the overall system of government, while democratic republic is the form of government (the other major form of democracy being direct democracy).

But who cares? The terminology is totally irrelevant to the topic at hand, because even if we didn't live in a democracy, we do subscribe to its democratic ideals. Are you really going to disagree that a fundamental principle of our system of government is the use of elections as a means of the people to keep the representatives accountable for their actions?

You also mention that party representatives aren't that accountable because most people don't pay attention to them... but they don't set elections - rather, it was the FL and MI legislatures who decided to break the rules and push the elections up early. So I guess I don't really understand your point there.

On your sidenoted question of delegate seating, it is actually not Dean nor the state reps who decide whether or not to seat FL and MI, it actually is Obama. DNC bylaws state that the DNC Rules Committee determines who is and is not eligible to be seated, and the rules committee is made up of a proportionate amount of representatives from each campaign. So if Obama has a majority of delegates, he will thus have a majority on the Rules Committee, and he can then decide whether or not to seat them. In this circumstance, Dean and the reps really don't have much of a say in the matter.

Ahh, the popular vote argument. It's enticing, but it's totally fallacious. Here's why: would you argue that the Redskins are a better team than the Nationals because they score more points per game? Of course not. They're two different games, and in football you always score more points. Likewise with primaries and caucuses: turnout is always higher in a primary than a caucus, so therefore the same percentage point margin of victory will thus translate into a higher popular vote margin for primaries than caucuses. This means that using the popular vote measure essentially favors primaries over caucuses, or rather favors the candidate that does better in primaries than caucuses. Is this fair? Hell no. Let's use an example. Both Minnesota and Missouri were given 88 delegates (72 pledged and 16 super). This year, 214,000 people turned out in the MN caucuses, which was nearly three times more than had ever turned out in the history of Minnesota's caucuses. But, because Missouri uses a primary instead of a caucus, they had 827,000 voters show up to vote. So while the current system in place gives MN and MO equal weight, using the popular vote measure would make MO count four times as much as MN. That would be like, the day after the general election, "Oh I'm sorry New York, but you didn't have quite the turnout that we thought you would have, so we're gonna give you ten less electoral votes to hand out to your favored candidate. Oh my, Georgia, what a turnout you had... we'll give you those ten electoral votes that New York no longer deserves. Well it looks like that changes who becomes president. Sorry Hillary/Obama, now McCain wins."

I'm sorry, but tying the state's electoral weight to its electoral method is just crazy, and doing it after a state has already voted is just wrong.

Three other problems: first, how would you count the caucus states that did not tally their popular vote? Not count them? Second, what about Texas? They had a primary and a caucus. You can't just count the primary and not the caucus, but you can't count both of them because then you're counting voters twice, which is unfair to every other state that had the lack of foresight to let voters vote twice. Third, what about open/closed primaries. More people vote in open primaries, but do we really want to favor them over closed primaries?

If only there was a way to take all of these different contests and give them a common denominator by which we can fairly compare the contests in equal terms. Wait! There is such a system, and luckily it's already in place. It's called the delegate system, and it's been the name of the game for the past four months now. If we want to change it, do it for 2012, but let's finish this election first. With delegates, just like it was supposed to be.